Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.
In the seminar in 1957, the objet petit a begins to take on the meaning of the object of desire, which means not this or that specific object that you think you desire, but what is aimed at or sought after that seems to be contained within a particular object – for convenience, one may begin to think of it as the ‘desirable quality’ of the object, or what is desirable in the real-world object. 129
“the object of desire in the usual sense is either a fantasy which supports the desire, or a lure.” Lacan specifies here that the objet petit a is the “imaginary cause of desire” rather than “what the desire tends towards”, to emphasise that this is not a “real world object” (a thing), but an object in the sense of “object relations” – that is, the vehicle upon which a function is exercised (the breast, the stool, the genitalia), and whose relational properties (e.g. controllability for the stool, excitability for the genitalia) form the basis of the different kinds of relationship one may have with the exterior world.
Lacan never suggested that the objet petit a was derived from part objects, only that real-world objects which have something of the properties of part objects are often the ‘receptacles’ for the objet petit a. For example, money shares the property of the stool (the object of the anal function) in being something that may be lost or retained, the unexpected loss of which may be a cause of anxiety, the ‘spending’ of which may be a cause of enjoyment in its own right (how common is the phenomenon of ‘spending money for its own sake’?), and giving and retention of which both have meaning for other people. In other words, it is not money in itself that is an object cause of desire, but its stool-like properties make it a good receptacle for the object cause of desire. 129
The objets petit a may be seen as a fragment of the Phallus, which arises from castration, when the child understands that the Phallus is possessed neither by itself nor its father, nor yet any living person.
However, the lost Phallus cannot be forgotten – the Subject knows it must have existed from the fact that it has lost it.
The Phallus leaves traces of itself everywhere – a little like the mirror of the Snow Queen in the fairy tale, which breaks into a thousand pieces that lodge themselves in objects and people. These Phallic fragments are the objet petit a – the object cause of desire—and can be found in many things: fast cars, the latest technological gadget, the ‘perfect’ cocktail dress … and in other people – a woman who hankers after the love of a powerful man may well be attracted to the Phallic fragment he appears to possess.
The quest to possess the Phallic fragment is a well-spring of creativity and effort: the search for the solution to the insoluble maths problem, to invent a new chess strategy, to perfect your skill at the piano, to discover the structure of DNA …
The pursuit of the Phallus is qualitatively different from the pursuit of fame or social recognition, as it is object-focused (or objective-focused) rather than purely narcissistic (although there will necessarily be a narcissistic element in everything we do); it is to do with the attempt to incorporate in oneself the Phallic fragments.
The Name-of-the-Father is an object of identification for the Subject, as well as the representative of the Other: it is central to the construction of both Subject and its ego. It is the signifier that the Subject can enunciate as representing the object of desire; the master signifiers that take its place will have exactly the same character. This is why Lacan attributes such an important structural role to the master signifiers as being the backbone upon which the Subject is built. Consider the following example:
A man loves sailing and has built much of his image and identity around this; many of his desires revolve around the sea and sailing and the sort of society that goes with it – all this is observable in his choices of clothes, homes, women, etc. ‘Sailing’ is among his master signifiers. In his early life, this man’s father was a keen sailor, and in his identification with his father and fierce rivalry with his brothers for his father’s attention, the boy’s skill at the helm became his main ‘weapon’ of power – his representation of the Phallus (or objet petit a).
If you think of how the Name-of-the-Father hides the true object of the mother’s desire (who was, after all a seaman), one can easily see how ‘sailing’ has replaced the Name-of-the-Father as the metaphorical representation of the object of desire. 133
Just as the master signifiers are substitutes for the Name-of-the-Father, the object cause of desire replaces the lost Phallus as the only thing that can answer the subject’s lack that causes anxiety. I hope this final example will show clearly the relationship between these elements:
A woman in her forties suffered chronic insomnia, caused by her inability to stop thinking, or to ‘switch off her mind’. She was a mathematician by career, and her master signifiers included ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’: she was almost exasperatingly rational.
Beneath the bar of her master signifiers was hidden her great desire for a rational universe, for achievable solutions to problems; the Phallic enjoyment of her life revolved around this. Analysis revealed a child hood in which she had suffered greatly from a mother whose apparently illogical decisions had cost the family greatly and whose ‘childish irrationality’ was a great source of suffering and anger to the child, who proceeded to build her own personality around the signifier and the objects that she felt were her best defence. Beneath the bar of ‘irrationality’ in her unconscious was, as ever the anxiety of the helplessness – castratedness—she had experienced as a result of it as child. Because there is jouissance in the functioning of the psychological apparatus, part of the woman’s problem was that she enjoyed thinking too much (in her insomniac moments, she would solve chess problems in her mind). The defence mechanism she had developed in childhood against the anxiety caused by her helplessness against irrationality had got out of control: her jouissance was transgressing both the pleasure and reality principles. The insomnia became particularly bad whenever situations arose that caused her to re-experience castration anxiety: difficulties at work that she could not ‘solve’ however much she thought would cause her completely sleepless nights, resulting in exhaustion and a vicious circle of not being able to think clearly, and feeling even more anxious about this. 135-136
The Thing (das Ding)
The Thing attracts desire perhaps because it is the object of loss itself: the unsymbolisable and unimaginable reality of loss.
Freud’s Thing is the object of yearning, of desire; it creates jouissance, and is the object of language, while being unsymbolisable. We seek to approach it all the time in what we say, but we can only circle it. Freud held that the Thing was the ‘sovereign good’ to which subjects aspire, but which is always unattainable, because attaining it would transgress the reality principle and will be experie3nced as suffering or evil. …
Lacan’s innovation was to equate the Thing with the mother – not the real mother, obviously, but the mother-who-is-lost: the absence of mother. … the Subject is constituted by its separation from and emotional relationship with the Thing, which is unsymbolisable and therefore cannot be repressed. This relationship with the Thing is so charged with primary affects characteristic of the mother-baby relationship …
I would postulate that if a primary characteristic of the Thing is to be unsymbolised and unsymbolisable, then perhaps the Thing is what is lost at the point of birth: the environment in utero, a state in which the baby had no needs, because all its needs were being met by the functioning of the mother. … 138
Although the Thing has something of the effects of the objet petit a arises from the Phallus, and thereby indirectly from the desire of the mother, the Thing arises from the primary affects of a relationship with what is not-yet-represented – the unforgettable-but-already-forgotten other. To return to a total enjoyment of this phantasmatic mother – this mother-as-world – would require a dismantling of the Subject – a kind of regression to a pre-language state that is simply impossible.
Because the Subject is brought into being by signifiers, and the Thing exists outside the Symbolic realm, absolute jouissance in the Thing would require an exit from the realm of signifiers, which is the realm of subjectivity, and the Subject itself would be erased, annihilated. 139
… what is the most intimate thing for a Subject, and yet the most threatening, in terms of its potential to block its access to the Symbolic? The mother is in many ways the gatekeeper of the Symbolic – it is her presence/absence that creates the polarities in which proto-thinking can begin, it is she who embodies the Other, and only she can invoke the Name-of-the-Father.
Therefore, the mother – structurally inaccessible, signified as prohibited, and imagined by the baby Subject as the sovereign good – constitutes, in her absence and in the impossibility of fully accessing her, the Thing. 139-140
The Thing is therefore an object of transgression, which is observable in behaviours that begin as seeking jouissance, and end in self-destruction. The Thing may be thought of as the object of the death drive: those who seek oblivion in heroin or people who strangle themselves in the name of sexual excitement may be acting out their search for the Thing. The search for the Thing exists in tension with the pursuit of the Phallus, and of the objet petit a; this dynamic of tensions set up between the different objects can be seen as the sum of the forces of creativity. 140